Kozmo of the Cosmos New Website!

The best comic in the world has a new awesome website! Visit www.kozmoofthecosmos.com. He's got a lot of details, history about the site, and you can buy a tee-shirt and coffee mug!

Kozmo is now being featured regularly on setiQuest.org. Yay SETI! Yay Kozmo!

Beware of the Amazon Free Tier Offer

Last month I applied for the Amazon Free Tier offer. Basically you get a free server in the Amazon cloud for one full year. This is to try it out and they hope you'll like it so much you'll stay with it after you pay. Sounds like a good deal, right? Not for me.

After having the server for over a month I got an email this morning saying I've been charge $140! I immediately sent an email to the support email and got this response:

I'm sorry for misunderstanding in regards to your usage and the Free Tier offer. I've researched your account and confirmed that the charges incurred on your account are correct. Although your account is eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier, your usage charges were based on activity that was outside the specifications of the offer. You have created a Large SUSE Linux Instance (m1.large) and only a Micro Linux Instance (t1.micro) qualifies for the offer. Therefor your Large SUSE Linux Instance is subject to standard pay as you go rates of $.44 per hour.

When I signed up for the free offer I had no idea about this difference. I feel like I've been misled. What if I was a student in India or Romania? I'd quite possibly be out a large sum of money, as if $140 is not a large sum of money to me!

Too bad, I was hoping this would be a good place to host my Ruby-on-Rails server to learn Ruby-on-Rails programming. I'll have to find another service. I wish there was a service I could pay $30 or less a month and know exactly what I am getting charged. If you know of any let me know.

Update 2 Days Later

I got an email from Amazon saying they will refund my money. Pretty nice of them, so no hard feelings! I canceled my account anyway. I think I'll try Rackspace, they have a computer in the cloud for $12/month, with Ruby-on-Rails. That seems like a good deal, and I'll be charged a simple rate.

ssh auto login not working

I encountered a problem setting up an account for auto login via ssh. I set up my keys properly, all the permissions on everything was correct. Still, when I ssh'd to the account it always asked for my password.

To debug the problem I restarted the ssh daemon on the server computer with the -ddd option, which put it into maximum debug mode. This showed me that the ssh server daemon was looking for the authorized keys in /.ssh/authorized_keys. This is incorrect, there is not /.ssh direcotry. It should e looking in ~/.sshd.

So, I edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config and corrected the line:
AuthorizedKeysFile /.ssh/authorized_keys
to be
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_key

That corrected the problem. Now I can auto login with ssh.

This is obviously a sshd installation bug.

Hope this helps someone! If so, leave a message!